External drive alone
Fast, private, not immutable
Great for quick restores of a lost file. Vulnerable if malware reaches your Mac while the drive is connected. Immutable only while unplugged.
Use for: local recovery, speed, air-gap when unplugged.
External drives
Plug in. Back up. Unmount.
An external SSD in your drawer, a NAS in the closet, a Thunderbolt RAID on your desk. macup handles them the same way it handles the cloud — encrypted, deduplicated, verified. Fast local recovery that pairs with macup Cloud for ransomware protection.
No card required
Fast local recovery. Not a ransomware vault.
External drives are the fastest way to restore — gigabytes per second over Thunderbolt. They're not the strongest ransomware defence, because anything that reaches your Mac can reach a connected drive. macup tells you this plainly in the dashboard and recommends pairing a drive with macup Cloud.
External drive + macup Cloud
Fast restore AND ransomware-resistant
Local drive gives you speed; macup Cloud's compliance-mode Object Lock gives you an immutable off-site copy no one can delete. This is the 3-2-1 shape macup recommends.
Use for: creators, professionals, anyone with deadlines.
macup — activity
2:14 PM LaCie Rugged SSD mounted · backup set "Creative Archive" queued
2:14 PM Snapshot started · 842 changed files since last run
2:19 PM Snapshot complete · 1.7 GB uploaded · 4 min 42 sec
2:19 PM LaCie Rugged SSD unmounted · safe to remove
Mount detection
Plug in. macup notices.
When you plug in a known drive, macup sees it, runs what's pending from the last session, and — if you asked — ejects it safely when done. Don't touch the menubar unless you want to. The drive knows what to do.
Multi-drive rotation
Two drives. One rotation.
Use two drives in rotation — one on your desk, one in a safe at home. macup tracks which drive is which, runs to whichever is currently mounted, and tells you when a drive has been offline long enough that it's due for a swap.
Warnings before a drive dies.
macup reads SMART status directly from each connected drive. Reallocated sectors, pending bad blocks, excessive temperature — surfaced in the dashboard before the drive fails. Most drive deaths are announced; you just need to be listening.
Samsung T7 Shield SMART Healthy All 12 SMART attributes within spec. Wear: 4%
Seagate Expansion 4TB SMART Degrading 12 reallocated sectors since last check. Consider replacing within 30 days.
OWC Envoy Express SMART Healthy All 12 SMART attributes within spec. Wear: 11%
About external drives.
What drives are supported?
Any drive macOS can mount: Thunderbolt 3/4/5 SSDs, USB-C / USB-A drives, bus-powered or externally-powered, APFS- or HFS+-formatted. NAS shares over SMB and AFP are also supported as destinations.
Is this different from Time Machine?
Time Machine makes full-file copies of everything; macup stores deduplicated, encrypted, chunked snapshots. A Lightroom catalog that grows from 40 GB to 41 GB costs 1 GB of storage in macup and 41 GB in Time Machine. Both can coexist on the same drive.
Do I need to format the drive?
No reformatting required. macup creates a folder on the existing filesystem and stores its encrypted blobs there. You can use the rest of the drive normally, though we recommend dedicating a drive to backups for space planning.
Is an external-drive backup ransomware-resistant?
Only while the drive is disconnected. Ransomware that reaches your Mac can see whatever's mounted, including your backup drive. That's why we recommend unplugging the drive when not actively backing up, and pairing external backups with macup Cloud (which uses immutable compliance-mode Object Lock that ransomware cannot delete).
Will macup fill my drive?
macup enforces retention rules before new snapshots are written — the oldest snapshots past their retention window get pruned, so disk space stays bounded. You set the retention; default is 90 days.
What about encryption on the drive itself?
macup encrypts everything it writes with AES-256 before it touches the filesystem. Even if someone steals the drive, they see ciphertext only. You can additionally enable FileVault on the drive for defense-in-depth.
Fast local restore plus immutable off-site backup.
Use a drive for speed. Use macup Cloud for ransomware resistance. Or both. 14-day trial.